Google cracks Silicon Valley's wall of silence on workforce diversity, confirming that it is largely white and male

Google Inc. revealed data that showed that the search giant's workforce is overwhelmingly male and white, the company said in a bit of self-revelation that may prod other Silicon Valley technology companies to be more transparent about their workforces' race and gender profiles.

"We've always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google," the world's biggest search-advertising company said in a blog post. "We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues."

The disclosure that Mountain View-based Google is 70 percent male and 61 percent white comes after the discussion about gender diversity in Silicon Valley technology hit a boil last year. Google said it felt it had to disclose its numbers to nurture solutions to the imbalances.